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So, you’ve got 10 minutes waiting for a bus to nowhere. Or maybe you’re trying to kill time while that awesome curry simmers away. Perhaps you have eclectic tastes and prefer to play the best game on your Android phone, ever?

If any of these situations apply to you, then we have a treat for you!

Right now, at this very moment, the Humble Bundle for Android and PC #12 is entering its final weekend. And in this Humble Bundle you can find the exclusive version of Titan Attacks for Android (amongst other gems). It is not yet available on Google Play and might not be for some time. This is your one and only chance to pick it up – and happy happy joy joy you can pay what you want! Now you can’t get much of a better deal than that.

Porting was done by Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games (he wrote a little post about it here on his blog). It was painstakingly ported from Java into Monkey (totally ungoogleable name, guys) because Jake isn’t familiar with Java (a shame, because he could have maybe just converted it over to libgdx and saved a bunch of time).

Hmm… it’s been a while since the blog had a new entry. It’s been even longer since I opened my virtual mouth to make commentary on the industry (and what fun that is!). But, the tripes are heavy, and thrice has the cock crowed under a full moon. The portents are good!

I recently had the good fortune to babble away in a thread on Facebook with Old Guard Indie Derek Smart, one of the very first and most prominent indie developers around. I got onto a subject which has been nagging away at me for some time, which I shall now dub “The Roach Theory of Indie Games Development”.

Chaz and Alli have been beavering away hard on our new “roguelike survival horror” game, Basingstoke, and now’s the time to show you an official teeny sneak peak of the game so far. Feast your eyes upon the video, and then read on, with the caveat that everything is in developmental flux and subject to changing beyond recognition at any moment…

I’m now peeping back out of my bunker and it feels safe enough to remove my flame-resistant underpants. This time around, I’ll give the polite version sans rhetoric and sardonic speech forms that confused so many people. Bless the Internet, but it seems that so many readers turned up to the blog post actually wanting to have a fight and somehow read the post as if it had been specifically written about them, for them. I’m afraid this is not how sardonic rhetoric speech works, and none of us are so important as to seriously believe somebody would write a random blog post on a two-bit backwater indie game developer’s site that was actually addressed directly to us, now, would they? Exactly. Now everyone’s calmed down I bit I’ll explain the post.

First of all, I be playin’ ya

My apologies for that.

I deliberately wrote the most invective, filthy, shit-stirring post I could to ensure that it would, indeed, make lots of people angry. Angry enough to repeat and respond to it all over the internet. Unfortunately in this day and age, well-reasoned and sensible posts such as those made by the wonderful Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software are received in hushed tones, nodded sagely to, discussed in high-brow intellectual circles and then disappear like ships in the night. Everyone goes back about their business and the next day everything is the same as before. Spiderweb is probably better-known than we are having been around for many more moons and made many more games, and still, people really aren’t taking a lot of notice about what’s going on.

So my little missive was designed to ensure that it spread far and wide, hopefully virally. Which it pretty much did, thanks to the power of Twitter. The site was flattened for a few hours. The plan was that Angry Internet Man would misunderstand the post, start a fire somewhere on the internet, and then someone with a few more braincells and the patience to actually read the whole article would respond and pour some sense on the discussion. Which by and large is exactly what happened. In this regard it’s been absolutely successful, bringing it to the attention of a far, far greater audience than we’d have reached if we’d just been nice and polite about everything.

And once again being absolutely honest: I didn’t do the post absolutely for altruistic reasons. It’s been said that it was a desperate bid for attention disguised as truth; in fact, it’s truth disguised as a desperate bid for attention. I knew beforehand about the total roasting that the internet was going to dole out to me after posting it. That’s exactly why no other developer wants to say what I had to say. So I’ve tried to mitigate the damage it was going to cause by at least getting Puppygames into the consciousness of as many people as possible.

Comments closed on this post. Anyone still somehow insulted by the previous blog post is simply not capable of reason and there is really no point in you venting flames about something you don’t understand; those who understand and/or support us, you have been well appreciated over the last week and we send hugs and kisses in your general direction.

I wish I hadn’t invoked Phil Fish

It seems that Phil Fish is some sort of bogeyman in gamer circles and the mere mention of Phil Fish causes all sorts of random and spurious bullshit to erupt. Unfortunately this seems to have deflected a full third of the conversations about the deeper meaning of the post onto rants for and against Fish. Next time I’ll pick someone more low-profile to use as a poster child, like Zoe Quinn or something.

It wasn’t about Puppygames

An awful lot of people wrongly thought the post was a desperate rant on behalf of a failing developer whose business is going down the tubes. I’m afraid you’ll have to reformulate your entire line of thinking and conclusions for two fairly solid reasons. Firstly, we’re not going down the tubes; we’re doing OK and we’ve got two games in development and all sorts of irons in the fire. Even if we did run out of money we’d still be making games because that’s what we like doing and we did it for 7 years before we made anything beyond a few beers.

Secondly, the post was simply not about Puppygames. It was about the entire indie game industry. Actually it probably applies to the AAA industry as well, or at least all the mid-sized studios kicking about that make AAA quality games but without the marketing budget that defines the AAA industry. All developers are in the same boat. All developers are having to deal with this problem – the problem of having worthless customers. I’m not even sure why there’s a pretence that we even have customers any more: they – you – all belong to Valve. We are unable to issue a refund for our games. We have no way to directly contact a customer after they’ve bought a game from us. But that’s ok, because you can get games for a dollar now, eh>?

There’s nothing wrong with our games

The next most prevalent response was to incorrectly assume, as a conclusion based on the incorrect assumption that we were going out of business, that there’s some problem with our “shitty” games. Again, I’m sorry to pop your bubble but you’re going to have to draw some other conclusions. Our games have grossed over $1.5m in the last four years or so and continue to sell (although not as well as we’d hope they’d sell but then again – we are a niche interest and we’ve had very little exposure from Valve relatively).

We do love our customers

…and it even says so explicitly in the previous post, but it seems a lot of people either didn’t actually bother reading it at all, or just made up what they wanted it to say and then got angry about that! No, we do in fact love our customers, even if they’re only worth 10p. What we don’t love is customers who demand that we fix their computers, threaten us with lawyers, chargebacks, violence (yes, really), and general hate, sometimes before they’ve even asked us for help getting their games working – and worse, sometimes even after we’ve gotten their games working.

That sort of crap is not good. Check out this sort of thing we get:

You fucking piece of shit, yeah you Cas make sure you read this, this is so funny for you to moderate something you don’t like right ?

It’s about your complaint “you re worthless”, you re just the same asshole just like Phil Fish, always bitching and insulting people who like your games, no have no motherfucking respect, you insult people because they are not happy with the game or because the game isn’t working ? They gave you their money and you re acting like a little bitch ? You know I hope for you I will never see you in real life at a convention because I swear I m gonna fuck you Cas you little bitch you and your stupid blog posts, it’s so easy to rant behind a screen, we will see if you re so tough, just like the fucking Fish.

and this:

Those dollars i spent on your shitty game will shure come in handy when you get cancer(hopefully)and have to pay your medical bills. O wait, i pirated that shit and i hope you’ll end up broke in a ditch.

And this stuff is minor compared to what a lot of developers receive. And none of us are exempt; it’s almost as if this sort of thing is “par for the course” once you get to a certain level of exposure. Just like “being a woman in a man’s world” meant at one time you had to just “suck it down” when you were groped, slobbered on, leered over, or just plain talked down to. It’s exactly the same issue with a different target: it’s about a total lack of respect for a relatively defenceless minority. There are hundreds of thousands of customers to every one developer. The odds are not on our side, and as we’ve noticed, the group IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to its size, and it sure does help when the target of such behaviour has very little support or sympathy.

In conclusion

Next time you feel like getting enraged at something, have a read through it again to make sure you’ve not misunderstood something, or missed something rather important in the post that changes its entire meaning. Especially if you’re getting enraged.

Now, I wonder what we’re going to do about the actual situation? That’ll be the subject of some other blog posts.

There are unwritten taboos on the internet. There are things you Don’t Say. There are replies you may not give. There are comments you may not make. There are truths you may not tell, in the world of public relations, for the public are fickle, and behave as a mob. A mob in all its feral, brutal depravity, lacking any and all of the qualities we laud upon humanity that allow us to feel so smug over all of the hapless animals that we raise ourselves over. And we are all, whether we admit it or not in public, under strict censorship of the mob. Even admitting that the mob censors our thoughts and feelings and the expression thereof is risky. Be careful! The mob may notice.

Well, it’s time for one of our lamentably infrequent blog entries. So much has happened since the last one I can’t even think where to begin.

Whither Battledroid?

Alas, woe unto Puppygames, for we are broke. Due to several decisions of dubious merit last year we’ve ended up wasting most of our cash on things that never flew. We tried for several solid months to rescue our direct sales but it seems nothing but nothing that we can do will change the fact that at any given moment, Steam comprises 97% of our income. And that’s just when there isn’t a crazy Steam sale on. So we wasted months on that and achieved precisely nothing.

Today we have put all our games, including Sandbox Mode for Revenge of the Titans, and our two soundtracks, and even all our source code, for sale through the Humble Puppy Bundle. This glorious sale lasts from 19th December through till 26th of December, and you may name whatever price you wish for everything, as is traditional.

You will also notice that Droid Assault and Ultratron have both been updated with two-player local co-op mode. Just grab your 360 controllers and join in. Yay! Expect bugs.

And you’ll also see that Revenge of the Titans has a Christmas Mode which appears only for the festive season (from 19th December to early January or thereabouts). And Droid Assault has a special new Christmas Mission too! Which is all very silly and hopefully a bit of fun.

Otherwise known as, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Deadlines and Fail Gracefully”.

Ok, that’s a little melodramatic.

We were doing quite well on the sprints but then Real Life decided to place a series of embuggerances in our way. I notice that the spelling checker in WordPress doesn’t understand “embuggerance” but I assure you, it is a word.

The plan for this sprint was:

Fix all the bugs we know of (there were plenty of issues with focus and tabbing and mouseovers, and one or two other little minor glitches)

Steam Integration – a full Steam version of all functionality. Steam is actually not so hard to integrate as it sounds as we have an awesome Steam integration library ready-made from our previous games, and mostly it involves removing functionality that we’ve implemented already in the game for Puppygames customers.

Serverside housekeeping batch jobs – make accounts dormant if they’re unused for a month, etc. That sort of thing. In addition the subscribers actually needed to be charged on a regular basis (not that we’d actually enable it at this point – it just needs to be there)

The last messages widget on title screen needed wiring up, with the associated event polling stuff all working between clients and server

And the last actually exciting feature, the Commander Screen, in which you can adjust your display name, personal avatar, army colours, change manufacturer allegiance, and request to join a faction. As well as placeholders for stats and medals.

We can log in using Steam and get our avatar displayed but sadly that’s as far as we’ve got

The Commander Screen is visually coming on very nicely but none of the functions are wired up to the server yet and it’s not fully integrated properly yet at all, more like Chaz just trying it out first than actually functional.

What’s Our Excuse This Time?

Well, mostly, this is all my fault, because Mrs. Prince is terribly ill and I’ve basically had to take almost the entire sprint off work to look after her and the kids, whom I can assure you are a pair of devils sent to torture my mortal soul. Right now she is in hospital and everyone is very upset though the prognosis is good. I don’t know particularly how any sprint survives contact with a quarter of the team suddenly stopping working in a completely random manner, but there we go.

The next thing is that Chaz’s Windows installation has somehow managed to blow up this morning and he’s going to have to reinstall his OS, which means at least two days down the drain for him too.

Finally Riven’s mouse has died. Not his squeaky one, but his old faithful electronic one, the one he uses to point at things on screens with. This makes Windows extremely difficult to operate, it would transpire.

Whither Now?

Well, I don’t think it’s really worth releasing Battledroid this sprint because we’ve barely got anything done on it – I think it really needs another week of work on it when we’re all firing on all cylinders so to speak – so we’ll leave it. Which brings me to the exciting news of what’s happening next week, which is that we will all be exhibiting at EuroGamer Expo 2013 in Earl’s Court, London, between September 26-29! Once again we’ll be giving away two brand new Nexus 7 (2013 models) as prizes for the best hiscore we have recorded in Ultratron and Droid Assault come Sunday evening. I’ve got a new Nexus 7. It is awesome. You need to come and play.

As we’re basically all away all next week and then a couple of days to recover, I wouldn’t expect much visible progress till Friday 4th October.

So, we actually got this one out bang on time. So on time there wasn’t quite enough time to actually write a blog post to coincide with it before we went on our summer hols

Important!

There is nothing to play yet – we’re concentrating on the user-interface and back-end stuff

Previous bugs are not fixed – such as tabbing not working – we’re working on fixing those now

What’s New?

This sprint was all about getting registered players to become premium subscribers, and finishing off the account maintenance functionality. So now you can subscribe or unsubscribe at will, and you can delete your account. Additionally the options panel, which wasn’t meant to be released until today but got released last week instead, was supposed to be in the sprint. So here it is Have a play with the GUI scale function and marvel at how awesomely clever our UI layout is. But first let’s explore the new functions and talk about them…

So, here we have the latest Battledroid alpha release, the second so-called “sprint”. You will notice it is lamentably already 4 days late – way to go guys! We’ve clearly not quite got the hang of this agile development malarkey.

Firstly, anyone who does not yet have the client already can get it here:

If you’ve already got the Battledroid client, you don’t have to redownload it – it should update automatically with the latest release like the rest of our games.

Known Issues

Expect to encounter…

tabbing doesn’t work in forms

scary security certificate warnings from emails

What’s New

In this sprint we wanted people to be able to register a guest account, change their email address, change their passwords, reset password if they forgot it, and log out again. We wanted the titlescreen UI to behave fully correctly, (less library bugs that is) and its design to be more or less finalised.

Well, we did all that, but we’ve also implemented the Options panel as well, which wasn’t supposed to be in till next Friday. Graphics options are a little more expanded upon from previous games, and check out the cunning GUI scale feature. The GUI will also automatically scale if you go below 4:3, meaning the game is perfectly playable on a monitor set up in portrait mode.

Anyway – if you could, we’d like you to test out the registration and login processes, and the account management functions. You will notice a scary security certificate warning if you click on any links we send you from the Battledroid mailer, but that’s because we’ve not got proper SSL certificates in place yet.

Also, if you would care to click on the second tab icon at the top – world map – you’ll get an early test of our new sprite engine. Though not completely optimized yet, we’re currently testing with 60,000 dynamic sprites on a background of 1 million static sprites. Middle mouse wheel will zoom, hold RMB to scroll, LMB to paint more sprites!

And… first cut of a theme tune – work in progess – open options and slide music volume to 11

Don’t get all excited now! What you see before you once it’s installed and run is just the title screen. We’ve got a seriously hectic schedule coming over the next 4 months, during which time we will release a new build every other Friday, and the development diary. Our ultimate goal is to get into beta with a minimum viable product by 22nd November 2013, at which point we will be seriously running out of money and unleash our Kickstarter project upon you all, to get the game finished and full of content.

The title screen may not look that exciting to start with but this is how we make our games: we get all the really boring stuff done first, because it has to be done, and once it’s all out of the way while we’re all fresh and full of energy, the only stuff left to do is the fun stuff, with lasers, robots, explosions, and stuff getting blown to bits! (Years ago I realised that leaving titles and menus and options till last is a recipe for misery, demotivation, and failure to complete a game).

As it currently stands, the title screen automatically creates a guest account to play Battledroid on our server, and that’s pretty much all it does right now. Most importantly however is whether you are experiencing anything out of the ordinary, like rendering glitches or connectivity issues. We’d like to hear your feedback, even as this early stage, allowing us to take it into account as we’re working on the next alpha.

In two weeks’ time, at the end of Sprint 2, expect to see the next round of functionality being added to Battledroid, which is account registration and management functions like the ability to change your email address, set a name for yourself, reset your password, etc. – more dull stuff. But important dull stuff.

It’s not often we get custom made fan art turning up in the mailbox but once in a while something fantastic appears. Just lately we received some photos from one of our younger fans. Simon enjoys Lego (don’t we all!) and in his spare time he defends the Earth from alien invaders in Revenge Of The Titans. So, being a creative fellow, he decided to put the two together and make some Lego models of Titans and buildings from the game. And here’s Simon and his creations:

Check out that Titan’s big red, glowing eye! A big thanks from the Puppygames team to Simon (and Chris) for letting us show off the models.

Soooo… we all had a great time at Rezzed last weekend – thanks to all those who stopped by our booth! All in all the show seemed a success, with a friendly atmosphere and eclectic mix of games, with indie games generally seeming a bigger pull than the AAAs that were there

Unfortunately we didn’t have a huge amount of time to play other games on show, but a few new to us that impressed were Trash TV, Montague’s Mount (both of which are on Steam Greenlight – here and here) and Revenge of the Sunfish 2 which really needs to be seen in motion to appreciate how completely bats it is.

The Win-a-Nexus-7 Hiscores Competition

We were giving away a brand spanking new Nexus 7 tablet to each player with the highest score for Ultratron, Droid Assault and Titan Attacks, and it was a great success with a nail-biting finale. As we approached the end of the show the highest scores seemed unbeatable, but as the returning hiscore holders of both Droid Assault and Ultratron watched on, their records were beaten!…

Because my previous blog post was not a complete academic essay on the subject, nor indeed intended to really go any further than the few people that visit our blog, it seems that a few people are deconstructing the arguments and poking some big holes in the assertion that “The Demo is Dead”, which is fine, but the article is not at all complete, and contains no hard data (of which I have a lot). At the time, I just thought I’d pen some musings on the subject talking to people who already didn’t care (existing blog readers, who are generally customers and therefore unaffected by what we do with our existing titles).

Anyway, the internet sort of exploded in rage and disbelief that a tiny indie developer could become such a cruel, heartless, candy-snatching killjoy.

As a general reply to various comment all over the place, here are some further musings:

99 Reasons To Not Buy Your Game

This was clearly an exaggeration for literary impact, and if that’s not obvious to you, for shame. But instead of just asking me what those reasons are, maybe you could engage in devil’s advocacy, and think of some yourself. Here are some I thought of, spuriously:

I got my fill of gameplay already from the demo. (Our demos typically gave away 25% or so of the full game progression)

I’ve had 90% of the initial delight of the game for nothing. Paying some money for the remaining 10% is a waste of money. (Note disconnection between “delight” and actual content)

I can’t be bothered to pay for it when I can go and play another free demo somewhere else.

I’ve already got a bunch of games I’ve paid for but not yet even played. Maybe I’ll not bother getting this one yet.

I played the demo ages ago and forgot all about it by the time payday came because something else distracted me in between.

I only buy games through Steam.

I’m a poor student/waster/single mum and I don’t spend money on games especially when I can be entertained endlessly by demos for nothing.

I loved the game except for this one small thing that I didn’t like like I can’t remap the fire button to X and for that reason alone I’m not going to buy it.

I thought the game was too easy but that’s because the demo can only show the first 10 levels which have to be easy to not put off the 95% of people who find it too hard.

You’re Just Using Yourself As A Single Data Point!

Some have accused me of using myself as a single data point (“I’ve never bought a game in the last 5 years from playing a demo”) and drawing my conclusions based on this, which is fallacy. This is not the case; my own, singular experience was what got me to look at the data in the first place. It was just a hunch, that I got to thinking about actually a few years ago. It’s only in the last year or so that the data has become impossible to ignore (see below for some figures).

The Nature of Puppygames Demos

Few people were aware of the exact nature of our demos, or even our games, and it’s probably worth researching because our games are of a particular ilk and available only on a particular platform. We make desktop arcade games mostly, and that’s a pretty strange niche to begin with, which substantially effects the way demos work.

Our demos were “full” versions of the games, which could be unlocked by registration (no further download). They tended to let you play the first 25% or so of the game unfettered before expiring on a cliffhanger (eg. first boss appears, or you’re just about to see the next “world”, for example).

Claims that we’re “doing demos wrong” are from people who, I suspect, have not been doing this for as long as we have. The fact is, our demos were more or less no different from nearly every other demo I’ve ever seen. They weren’t even unsuccessful either – they converted at an industry-respectable rate, AFAIK. The problem is that rate is shit and the amount of money we can charge for a successful conversion has been eroded,which brings me to…

Context Is Everything

The context of pricing and market positioning, specifically. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen the average price of an indie game plummet from $20 (sold direct by the developers) to $5 (sold on Steam or BigFish in a sale) to about $1 (sold in a bundle of some sort). Steam pioneered the price slashing in the market – I’m sure you educated types with economics degrees have a special name for this manoeuvre. In the space of a couple of short years, direct sales plummeted to less than 1/10th of what they used to be (and they were never great). Almost overnight, the chances of being an actual indie developer – and succeeding! – have dropped from “you’ll be lucky” to “you’ve as much chance of winning the lottery”. Not only had consumer expectation of prices been eroded from $20 to $5, but consumers were also taught by Steam to buy on the basis of video and recommendation and, most importantly of all, discounts.

Then, just as things didn’t seem they could get more crazy, along comes the Humble Indie Bundle, and we’re now becoming accustomed to picking up titles for a dollar or less. Again, demo unseen. We’re conditioned to buying stuff because it is cheap not because we necessarily want it. I say “we” – yes! I am one of you. I am a consumer. I’ve got a hundred games in my Steam library. I am doing all these things. I won’t buy a game if it’s not on Steam any more. I won’t buy a game if it costs over $10. And so on. This reminds me of an anecote many years ago when a friend of mine came bouncing into the room full of glee because she’d bought some mint essence. When I enquired what was so amazing, she told me that it had been 75% off so she just had to buy it. I can’t recall her ever before or since actually making anything with mint essence in it, but it was a bargain!

In this context, what we now see is that 95% of our income – any developers income – comes not from conversions of demos, but from sales via gatekeepers and bundles. What the focus of my original article was really about is that there is a case for simply dropping prices through the floor and not giving anything away for free. There is “free” stuff everywhere, already. The differentiator we now have is that if you want to sample our stuff, it will actually cost you. Otherwise it is simply unavailable. It is out of reach. You can look through the glass into the shop but you can’t touch it until you spend a (paltry) amount of money. Just like with mostly everything else in the world these days.

Are We Right?

There’s no harm in being wrong. We can be wrong. We’re going on what the data tells us, and we have a lot of data. We’ve sold 481,529 games in the last 3 years, and 30,246 of those have been to people who played a demo. That means the other 451,283 sales were made without anyone ever seeing a demo. If you want percentages, that’s 6%. We’re quite happy to be proved wrong! If the data tells us we’re wrong, we’ll go back to using demos.

Our hypothesis is, we’ll make a bit more money if we ditch demos and drop the prices. As you can say what you like about the 97% of sales being without demos and argue till you’re blue in the face that you don’t buy games without playing a demo first, go on ahead. Argue away – you’re arguing that black is white. You’re not making us 97% of our sales. The bit you need to argue over is this:

6% of our sales are to demo players, direct, and they have made us $72,000. We think that if we drop our prices hugely, and ditch demos, that we’ll continue to make 6% of our sales direct, but that we’ll make a bit more than $72,000.

The Sands Shift Beneath Our Feet

And still that’s not the whole story. The thing that most beginning developers – us included – fail to take into account is how the markets change over time. As I said, when we first started, we sold conversions on demos for games that cost $20. We started just at the tail end of a golden era in independent game distribution (typical bad luck, huh). The internet had just revolutionalised developing games and the gatekeepers were just about to move in, along with a flood of other developers who suddenly discovered they could do it too. It is suprising in hindsight that so many developers clung to the $20 price model in the face of what was happening.

Things came to a head in about 2008 or so, when we released Droid Assault. Droid Assault was released to the sound of tumbleweed. No-one was even the least bit interested. It’s a great game (IMHO, haha), but when it was released, nobody wanted to buy it. Customers were already thoroughly in the pockets of Valve and BigFish by then. If you didn’t have a game on a portal, it simply didn’t sell. DA must have shifted literally a few hundred copies. By contrast on Steam, now it’s finally out on Steam that is, it’s shifted thousands of units.

And so we must realise that the market is changing, all the time, imperceptably slowly. Let’s look at those figures I just mentioned above, and instead, let’s look at just the last 12 months:

In the last 12 months we’ve sold 77,224 games, of which just 725 were demo conversions. The demos weren’t suddenly any different. The prices weren’t suddenly any different. Suddenly, after just 2 years, we’re only making less than 1% of our sales via demos. Nothing else changed except the entire rest of the market.

So actually what you really need to be arguing over is this:

1% of our sales are to demo players, and they have made us $5200 (yes, really). We think that if we drop our prices hugely, and ditch demos, that we’ll continue to make 1% of our sales direct, but that we’ll make a lot more than $5,200.

Many years ago, when we first started making games, the perceived wisdom of the age was to follow an apparently successful formula, and strike it rich. Or at least, make a living. Games sold for an average of $20 or so. This is in the dim, dark depths of history, in 2003.

This formula was: offer a demo, and convert demo players into customers by having amazing demos (and, as a secondary, offer a money back guarantee just in case a customer mysteriously wasn’t satisfied). All you need is a large enough influx of traffic downloading a large enough number of demos and a large enough conversion rate. Simple! And this we have done, for the last 10 years.

To cut a long story short, it doesn’t work for us.

Today, none of our games have a demo, and they probably never will have again, either. The Demo is dead.

Long Live Video!

Why have we done this? How can we possibly gain from no longer hosting demos? Well, the times have changed. I have come to realise that I’ve not bought a single game from playing a demo in the last 5 years, maybe longer. Why am I buying games? Or rather, why am I buying the games I am buying as opposed to other games?

Mostly because they’re recommended to me by friends, and sometimes reviews. That generally isn’t enough though; I also want to look at the game before I buy one. And this is where video comes in! Just about every game I’ve bought for the last 5 years has been on the basis of watching a video of the game – either a review along the lines of Total Biscuit, or a trailer in Steam, or on the developers’ websites, or shared on Facebook or Twitter. Usually I don’t even need a recommendation from a friend if I watch a trailer for a game that I think looks interesting.

But there is another thing at play.

Almost none of the games I’ve bought have even had demos. They’re full versions only, accessible only via Steam, and/or usually… rather cheap. And with a bit of investigation we’ve noticed that 99.9% of all the games we’ve sold on Steam have been bought “blind”, without anyone ever sampling a demo.

This got me to wondering why we are bothering with demos any more.

What Does a Demo Do?

I’ll tell you: it has three primary functions:

To assure the end user that the product actually installs and runs ok on their machine

It gives the potential customer a good long demonstration of the game with no up-front investment on their part

The shocker: it then gives them 99 excuses not to buy the game.

Video manages to sidestep 2 and 3 nicely. Video still gives the customer a demonstration of the game, albeit non-interactive; but it does have the potential to cram all the interesting bits into a very short space of time – rather like a movie trailer does. But, barring a total disdain for the style or genre of game, it doesn’t give the customer any reasons not to buy the game. Not a single one. You have to actually pay to form an opinion on how it plays.

The first function is trickier. Why do people buy something if they don’t know if it’ll even run or not? It turns out it’s required a little bit of technical wizardy to solve, which we’ll be releasing the source to in due course as it’s GPL, but basically – take a look at Revenge of the Titans now, if you’re unregistered, and you’ll see that the title screen has in fact been replaced by the video trailer which is now rendered inside the game. So we know at this point that the game is going to run fine on your machine, and more importantly, so do you. We’re slowly converting the other three games into video title screens as well.

In-App Purchase

Of course, once a potential customer has installed the game, fired it up, and been presented with the trailer video instead of an ordinary title screen, that’s not quite the whole story. Customer clicks “PLAY”… and is transported straight to an in-app purchase screen which you can use to unlock the game there and then. Unfortunately this IAP screen can only take credit and debit cards (no PayPal or other dubious payment systems). However… it is working, and working nicely.

Now all our games have a built-in IAP system (and a cunningly built-in one-click buy mechanism too), we’ll be able to collect some stats on how things look without demos, and I’ll be following up in a few months about the end result.

Firstly and most obviously, it’s now got fancypants shader effects in it, which I’ll be expanding on a little in another patch. You can turn these off in the Options menu.

Secondly, we’ve added Easy Mode. This is a campaign mode like normal campaign mode but the difficulty is capped at a much lower level for more casual play.

Thirdly, we’ve enhanced Sandbox Mode for those of you that have it. The editor now allows you to specify a lot more detail about spawn points, and also specify exact amounts of each resource available. Check out the new editor options at www.RevengeOfTheTitans.com

Fourthly, we’ve added Research Respec – you can now completely redo your entire research tree, at any time, without penalty.

ps.
You will notice a little screen flickering going on at the start, which we will soon remove. It’s gathering some logging information for us so we can get to the bottom of a driver crash. Sorry for the annoyance.

I was idly warbling away to fans on the Steam Community forums today when I had a little think about some of the facts and figures involved in making games. When I read it back to myself I realised it was actually pretty fascinating reading for people outside of the industry (that is, the players of our games). There were some amusing estimates of how much effort goes into making games from the fans, so here are the facts and figures for you all to see, and hopefully, tweet, reblog, and comment about, until all children are suitably scared in their beds and night and vow never to want to becomes games developers ever again, and some sort of massive JUST SAY NO style meme floods the internets and makes it to the very top of Reddit’s wonderfully insular and self-referential news pages.

Ultratron took 24 man months to develop, or if you want to put a financial figure on it, about $120k at ordinary salary rates. Ultratron has so far made a loss of $100k.

Titan Attacks took approximately the same amount of time. Titan Attacks has just broken even after 7 years, so that’s cause for a can of lager in celebration.

Droid Assault took quite a bit longer – about 36 man months, or $180k ish. Droid Assault has so far made a loss of about $120k.

Revenge of the Titans took about 7 man-years to develop, or about $420k. It’s only just broken even. Sandbox mode took 12 man-months and has so far cost us $56k. It is unlikely to ever break even.

For most of the last 10 years, I subsidised all the development of the games by working as a menial contractor in the IT industry and effectively putting every spare hour of my life into them. We started seriously in 2002. It wasn’t until 2010 that we actually made enough money to buy anything more than a celebratory curry!

So now you know why a) you don’t really want to be an indie game developer if you can help it and b) why we’re not making any more arcade games

* probably. Unless a genius can think of some way we can make them for about a tenth the cost that’s palateable.

We gathered in our millions around the Consoles of our cities to hear the announcement. Whole families turned out and stood out in the plazas waiting for the rumblings from inside the machine to herald its latest edict for the good of humanity. We stood in silence, until a deep red light flicked on from a scanner situated near the top of every Console, and a laser scanned over the suspended crowd, surveying. Counting. And then the Console spoke the words of Central Nexus.

All humans are to report in an orderly fashion to their nearest RecycloMat Facility. Transportation will be provided free of charge by Central Nexus – your friendly system overlord. There is no need for alarm and recycling is painless. Central Nexus wishes at this time to thank you for your peaceful co-operation in this hazardous waste recycling operation and wishes you continued happiness and contentment for the remaining duration of your current form.